


Night

by SongOfTheBadWolf



Category: Gallifrey (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-14
Updated: 2017-06-14
Packaged: 2018-11-14 05:40:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11201595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SongOfTheBadWolf/pseuds/SongOfTheBadWolf
Summary: In another alternate Gallifrey, shadows cover the citadel.Set between 'Disassembled' and 'Annihilation'.





	Night

It was night on this new world. Twin moons hung in the blackness, pulling Narvin’s eyes from the stardust above their heads. More than any other Gallifrey they’d seen, he could pretend this one was home, and his hearts ached.

Leela, beside him, wouldn’t stop fidgeting. “This place smells _wrong_ ,” she hissed. “There is something very dark here.”

“You always think something’s wrong,” he muttered. “We’re in the outskirts of the citadel; it looks just like home.”

“Then where are all the Time Lords? I hear nothing but emptiness.”

“It’s _night_ , everyone’s probably asleep.”

“I can feel something wrong, Narvin - this is _not_ our home, and we should return to Romana.”

Narvin’s gaze snapped away from the stars and back to his travelling companion. “I thought the whole point of this was to explore. What, you want me to tell Romana that we found a Gallifrey similar to our own and we left because you had a bad _feeling?”_

“Mock my instincts all you like, but this place is dark. I know it. It is empty and what remains in the emptiness should be left here.”

Narvin sighed, trying to gather patience. “Look, I’m going to walk through the citadel, and you can come if you want, or go back through the portal and let me do this on my own. One or the other.”

Leela glared at him, an expression no less threatening despite her blindness. “You will need protection, you always do.”

“I suppose that means you’re coming along?”

In answer, she started walking down the street ahead of him. Narvin sighed and hurried to catch up; she’d gotten surprisingly good at navigating the capitol by memory, but that wasn’t always enough.

………………………

The city was just as Narvin remembered. Most worlds they’d visited had at least small differences in layout, changes that reflected the cultures of broken universes that had taken different paths. This one, though, this was theirs, or at least it seemed to be. He was beginning to think that Leela might be right, though. They hadn’t seen a single Time Lord on their way to the CIA tower, and now that they were in the Prydonian quarter, he realized something even more ominous - not a single electric light glowed in the windows.

He kept quiet, not wanting to enforce Leela’s suspicions, as they reached the central tower. Inside, the only lights glittered from luminescent crystals in sconces on the wall, with faint moonlight through the windows giving the enormous hall an otherworldly feel.

“We should keep heading toward the CIA tower,” Narvin said finally, unnerved by the quiet. “Assuming my bioprint is the same, it should be easy for me to get access, and I can find out more about this Gallifrey from there.”

“As long as you even exist here.”

“Well, yes, we can hope,” he muttered, deciding to take the route through the Panopticon. He keyed in the manual passcode on the door. “Leela, this way, we’ll --”

Narvin wasn’t sure which was worse, the high-pitched alarm screeching through the quiet or the flash of light as the emerging security gate descended.

“Leela!”

He slammed against the door as it shuddered to a halt behind him, hearing an echoing crash from the other side.

“Narvin?” Her voice was muffled through the door, but she sounded more confused and worried than anything else. “What happened?”

_Why didn’t I check for that?_

Emergency power must have still been active, probably to prevent intruders. When he’d keyed in the manual code without special authorization, he’d tripped the alarm. “I’m sorry, Leela,” he said. “There’s… I think there’s something wrong here, like you said. I can get the door open again, but I need to override it from the CIA tower. There’ll be guards coming; get to the Cerulean Court and wait there if you can. It’ll be safer than staying in the open. It’s not too far; you remember the way?”

“Yes - Narvin, be careful.”

“You too,” he answered quietly as he turned away from the door.

……………………….

The city was still deserted, however far he walked through it. For his standard passcode to be rejected, there must have been a citadel-wide emergency; in his world, at least, members of the high council needed to include an additional contingency protocol in any code in these circumstances.

And, given that he set off the alarms, there _should_ have been guards.

He sensed the same feeling Leela had described, the strange foreboding that something was truly _wrong_ here. The world was silent, apart from his footsteps on the shining hallways. At the entrance to the CIA tower, he included the additional code, and the doors slid open before him. The lift was quiet too, just a steady drone that did nothing to block out the slowly growing fear of what he might find in the matrix records.

What he did find in that tower was far, far worse than he could have imagined.

Romana was at the central desk, various holographic monitors around her. An _alternate_ Romana, he forced himself to remember, but it was almost impossible to see his president collapsed and bleeding from a stab wound at her back and to not feel like it was really _her_ who was dead in front of him.

Part of him was pulled forward in a rush and the other stood frozen; the fear won out. He took a deep breath and stepped forward slowly to try to view the monitors, but before he could focus his attention, he saw what else had been hidden by the desk.

Romana wasn’t the only casualty in the room. This universe’s Leela was lying on the tower floor near the window, her hand on her knife; she’d fought until the last. Brax was here too, and after watching him fall into the void only a few days earlier, seeing him here made his possible death seem far more real. Even more disturbingly, now that he’d moved away from the doors, he could see his own dead body up against the front wall.

 _This isn’t real this isn’t real this isn’t real --_ except it _was_ real, in this world, in a world more similar to his own than any he’d seen on this cursed journey, there was a version of the four of them who’d all died in this room and he could _see_ them. Narvin’s hands were shaking and he forced himself to turn away from the deaths and look at what Romana had been trying to accomplish with her last moments.

The monitors blinked steadily. A small one in the corner showed power readouts throughout the capital, almost all drained, main power gone in all the lighting systems. He took a moment to key in the override for the emergency door locks. Another held matrix data - records of far, far too many Time Lord minds uploaded all at once as something took all their lives. An outgoing message flickered in the central screen; not a distress call, he realized, but a warning, a plea for any incoming ships to avoid Gallifrey at any cost.

Everything felt horribly, desperately cold. Whatever had invaded had done so in a matter of microspans. It didn’t wage war, it didn’t conquer, it simply killed. He stumbled backward, his hand brushing the table and coming away sticky with blood - probably Braxiatel’s; the Time Lord’s back was against the side of the desk. Narvin ran.

The lift down from the tower felt like an eternity as he leaned back against the wall, pulse racing. He had to find Leela and get them both out of here, before whatever had destroyed this Gallifrey found them too. The hallways of the capitol passed in a blur in his memory, the darkness an ever-present reminder that this world was lost.

“Leela!” he shouted as he skidded through a door near the Patrex academy. Thankfully, the human was waiting, sitting with her back against the inner fountain. The Cerulean Court was one of the few areas of the capitol where nature still had a foothold; carefully curated trees and plants made up a peaceful garden with a multilayered fountain at the center. Leela sprang to her feet. “Narvin? What is it, what happened?”

“We have to go. _Now._ ”

“Narvin --”

“They’re dead. Everyone on this world, they’re all dead, we’ve got to get back to the portal.”

He braced himself for a cutting line about not having listened to her earlier, but she only followed him out the other door, dark worry on her face. They ran back to the portal in silence, Narvin half expecting whatever had killed this world’s Time Lords to manifest in front of them, but the capitol was still eerily empty. He couldn’t even begin to slow his thoughts or his hearts until they were out of the main city and he could see the place they’d materialized. If the portal wasn’t there anymore --

Before he could seriously consider that, he saw the telltale shimmer of their way back to the Axis. He stopped, gasping for breath, before they went through.

“Narvin,” Leela murmured, “what did you _see?”_

“You don’t want to know.”

She grabbed onto his arms, pulled him back around to face her. “I _need_ to know.”

He couldn’t get the words out. “I-- I saw the four of us.” He barely recognized his own voice.

The shock on Leela’s face told him she understood. She took his hand, and they stepped together back into the Axis.

**Author's Note:**

> so i actually started writing this almost a year ago; i found it in my files and decided to finish it. 
> 
> now that i've watched Class, i realized partway through ending this that this was definitely the Shadowkin.


End file.
